A book that combines botany with beauty. Christina Brodie’s beautiful drawings of trees, flowers, leaves, fruit and seeds rely on a botanically trained eye. So it’s a textbook in two ways: artistic and scientific. The colours and shapes of plants please the eye; understanding those colours and shapes challenges the brain.

So does capturing them on paper with pencil, ink and paint. Art is an intelligent activity in more ways than one. Illustration has one big advantage over photography: the eye can be selective and adaptive in a way the lens can’t. When Christina Brodie drew a passion flower for page 31, she reduced it to its essentials to capture its structure: the three-pronged stigma, androgynophore, hinged anther, corona filament, perianth segments, and so on.

Colour and shading weren’t important, so she didn’t depict them. Elsewhere, she does: the autumn leaves on pages 96 and 97, for example. There are also two photographs on page 97 and they underline the advantage of illustration. Brodie’s leaves are isolated on stark white paper; her photographs have backgrounds and inessentials. Photography can’t focus and exclude in the way that illustration does and there’s no clear sense of purpose and mind in photography.

Nor does photography pay proper tribute to the complexity and depth of nature. A camera can record a leaf in the same time and with the same ease as it records a forest. Or record a star with the same easy as a galaxy. If photography is an art, it’s a lazy one. There’s nothing lazy about botanical art and some of the power of this book comes not just from the obvious skill of the artist but also from her implicit patience and perseverance. We see in an instant what sometimes must have taken hours to create.

So art is a ritual that pays proper respect to the deep evolutionary time that is also implicit in this book. From fruits and flowers to ferns and fungi: plants come in a huge variety of forms and have been evolving and diversifying for hundreds of millions of years. Anyone who opens this book will see that for themself, but botanical artists like Christina Brodie appreciate it more deeply. She’s a highly skilled artist and thanks to printing she’s able to share her skill with many others.

Richard Lewington illustrated the excellent Field Guide to the Dragonflies of Britain and Europe (2006). Here he’s both illustrator and author, describing and depicting the many species of mammal, reptile, bird, insect, arachnid and mollusc that can be found in a British garden. But that list isn’t exhaustive: millipedes and centipedes aren’t insects or arachnids:

Luminous CentipedeGeophilus carpophagus

Dark and sombrely marked, this centipede is sometimes known as the “glow worm” as it gives off phosphorescent light at night. Found under loose bark and fallen logs, and in damp sheds and buildings. Widespread, it appears to be essentially coastal in northern England and Scotland. (“Chilopoda”, pg. 164)

Centipedes are strange animals. Luminous ones are even stranger. But glowing-in-the-dark isn’t the greatest feat of Geophilus carpophagus. Like all other centipedes, it has to solve complex biomechanical problems with an exigent allocation of neurons. As Lewington notes, centipedes are elusive, fast-moving and predatory. But they have flexible bodies that are never in the same orientation twice. Some very interesting algorithms must be at work in their brains and bodies.

In a more general sense, that’s true of every page in the guide proper, with Lewington’s drawings of beautiful or bizarre animals facing potted summaries of their behaviour and habitats. Evolution is a kind of algorithm and every species in this book, from the sparrowhawk, Accipiter nisus, on page 49 to the horse leech, Haemopis sanguisuga, on page 195, has a common ancestor. So evolution is the greatest artist of all, working with matter and energy to create millions of variations on that common ancestral theme.

But the human brain is also a product of evolution, so this book is actually part of nature. That would be true even if it used photographs, but I prefer illustrations. Photography is literally “writing with light”, but a camera is a mindless mechanism. Richard Lewington understands light and had to struggle as he learnt how to capture it on paper. By drawing nature, you acquire a deeper understanding of the richness and complexity of nature. When you draw as well as Richard Lewington and his brother Ian, who supplied the bird illustrations here, you can initiate the unartistic and bring them at least across the threshold of nature’s temple. There’s something magical and ritualistic in illustration that isn’t found in photography and a book like this is as much as an aesthetic experience as an intellectual one.

When an earthquake or large meteor strikes the earth or moon, it can ring like a bell for a long time, as shock waves bounce to and fro, slowly dying out. That can happen in culture too: some events are like earthquakes that shake a formerly stable landscape. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is one of those cultural earthquakes. There was a riot at its début in Paris in 1913.

Ferenc Puskás (1927-2006) (pronounced roughly FEHR-ents PUSH-kaash) was the orchestrator of another Slavic earthquake, forty years later and about 150 miles north-west, in London. Except that Puskás wasn’t Slavic and didn’t speak a Slavic language. Hungarians and their language aren’t Eastern European in any conventional sense. Instead, they invaded Eastern Europe and overturned a Slavic tradition. Puskás and his Magyar team-mates invaded and overturned another tradition when they beat England 3-6 at Wembley Stadium in November 1953.

How could that happen? As György Szöllősi says viâ his translators Andrew Clark and Matthew Watson-Broughton, it was generally accepted at the time that “England were invincible on their own turf” (“The Magical Magyars”, pg. 60). At the return match in Budapest in May 1954 Hungary did it again. Only more so: this time the score was 7-1. Tom Finney, himself one of the all-time greats, said that it was like “cart horses playing race-horses” (pg. 61). Puskás scored twice in both games and one of those goals, created by a pull-back that sent Billy Wright sliding off the pitch at Wembley, is one of the most famous of all time.

If his career had ended after he came off the pitch in Budapest, Puskás would have sealed his place in footballing history. And it did soon look as though his career might be over. Stalin died in 1953 and increasing unrest in Hungary led to full rebellion in 1956. Bullet-holes in the parliament buildings in Budapest still show what happened next: the rebellion was brutally crushed. Puskás was one of more than 200,000 Hungarians who went into exile.

He wasn’t able to return for decades and his fellow countrymen could only whisper about the remarkable feats he performed when he managed to find a new club. It was called Real Madrid and Puskás joined Alfredo Di Stéfano to become one of its greatest ever players: he scored seven goals in two European Cup Finals for the club. His first batch was four, in the 7-3 crushing of Eintracht Frankfurt in Glasgow in 1960. Then he scored a hat-trick against Benfica in 1962.

Unfortunately, Benfica scored five goals and no-one else scored for Real. Even the greats don’t always win, but that hat-trick proves that Puskás could do remarkable things even in defeat. His statistics are astonishing, reminiscent of Don Bradman’s in cricket: 511 goals in 533 Hungarian and Spanish top-flight games and 84 goals in 85 games for Hungary. The former Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson is one of those who are still awed by Puskás: Ferguson writes the foreword to this book and says he “dodged school” in 1953 to watch Hungary play England at Wembley. FIFA now have a Puskás award for goal of the year and there’s a photo of Cristiano Ronaldo holding up a red number 10 shirt bearing the name Puskás.

Ronaldo is another great, but his challenges off the pitch are remembering where he left the keys for his Lamborghini and deciding which ear to put his diamond stud in. Puskás lived through the Second World War, then saw a team-mate, Sándor Szůcs, hanged for trying to leave Hungary, then came under sentence of death himself when he went into exile after the Hungarian Uprising. He didn’t wear diamonds, he was a diamond in the Aranycsapat, the Golden Team that was the pride of Hungary before Puskás and team-mates like Zoltán Czibor and Sándor Kocsis became unpersons as traitors to the communist state.

This biography is short and easy to read, but it would have been improved by an index and contents page. Puskás’s career would have been improved by a World Cup winner’s medal and György Szöllősi describes why he didn’t get one. He also describes what Puskás’s real ancestry was and why he censored his birthdate. Hungary is an interesting country in lots of ways and it’s still making more of a mark in Europe than its size and population might lead you to expect. Puskás put his mark on European history in ninety minutes at Wembley in 1953, but he did much more than that and this book tells you how.

It’s an odd experience to pick up a famous book in an unfamiliar language. I’ve read Nineteen Eighty-Four many times in English and also tried it in French, Spanish and Italian. Reading it in English is like picking up a perfectly ripe apple and biting into it. I don’t have to think, I just have to experience.

It isn’t like that in French, Spanish and Italian. The book isn’t a ripe apple any more: it’s an exotic fruit with a tough skin that has to be peeled and cooked. I have to think about what I’m doing and it takes much longer to eat much less.

In Polish, Nineteen Eighty-Four becomes a coconut with an exceptionally tough and hairy shell. And I don’t have any way of getting inside. All I can do is pick it up and shake it, hearing the swish of the milk inside and feeling its solidity. I know there’s good eating in there, but I can’t get at it.

Of course, to a literate Pole Rok 1984 is a ripe apple, ready to be experienced without conscious effort. Languages aren’t like ordinary phenomena. A knife is a knife. A bird is a bird. A cloud is a cloud. Billions of human beings for thousands of years have perceived those things in more or less the same way. But human beings haven’t named them or talked about them in more or less the same way. Language both defines humans and divides us. No-one can be familiar with all languages, so everyone can have the experience of picking up something familiar that is suddenly encased in something impenetrable.

Here’s the opening line of Nineteen Eighty-Four in English:

It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.

English suddenly looks anomalous: “and” in all the other languages is represented by a simple vowel and “thirteen” starts with “tr-”. You see English differently when you look at other languages and you realize that English doesn’t have a fixed form. It changes when you look at from the perspective of another language.

So does every other language. To a speaker of Russian, Polish is partly familiar. To a speaker of English, Polish seems almost wholly unfamiliar, although English and Polish have a fairly recent common ancestor and have a lot of words in common, beneath the disguise of orthography and historic change.

One of those shared words is readily apparent in the opening chapter of Rok 1984 (which I assume means “Year 1984”):

Most readers of the English version will remember that Winston sees a poster and a slogan at the beginning, so the meaning of WIELKI BRAT PRATZY isn’t hard to guess. Wielki Brat must mean “Big Brother” and pratzy must be “is watching” or some equivalent. Brat is closer to “brother” than French frère, from Latin frater.

But brat behaves like the Latin word. A little further into the book, you’ll see this:

Which must the part where Winston repeatedly writes “Down with Big Brother” in his new diary. Wielki Brat has become Wielkim Bratem. So Polish inflects like Latin. And the last line of the book (before the “Aneks”, or Appendix) is: Kochał Wielkiego Brata – He loved Big Brother.

So you could gradually work out a lot of Polish vocabulary and grammar using simply your memories of Nineteen Eighty-Four in English. With an actual copy of the English version, you could compare and contrast line by line, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. In short, you could learn Polish from Rok 1984.

There’s a much simpler way to do that, of course, but I can imagine a story about a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four in an unknown language falling into this universe from a parallel one. Then linguists would have to use the Rosetta stone technique.

But what if the book from a parallel universe were in a wholly unfamiliar script too and didn’t have any images? This Polish copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four is instantly recognizable as such. It’s called Rok 1984, names the author as “George Orwell”, and one edition has the face of Stalin on it. In Russian, “George Orwell” becomes Джордж Оруэлл. It’s stepped away from English. What if it stepped a lot further? What if an unknown version of Nineteen Eighty-Four didn’t use an alphabet but an ideography like Chinese or Japanese?

I still think it would be identifiable, given sufficient computing power. In fact, I wonder whether any sufficiently long text in any conceivable human language might be comprehensible to a sufficiently powerful computer, based simply on the relationship of the patterns within it. I don’t mean that the computer could identify it as related to a known text in a known language: I mean that any text at all might be comprehensible, because there are only a limited number of things one can say about the world, even if there are an infinite number of ways of saying those things.